


Longing Rusted Daybreak

by CopaceticBrainBox



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Drabble, Lost Memories, Stucky - Freeform, my ramblings, plums, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 06:03:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7210883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopaceticBrainBox/pseuds/CopaceticBrainBox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the reason minds are supposed to get mushy as we get older, Bucky thinks. Memories are supposed to fade, go fuzzy around the edges, reshape themselves to a smile, just a flash of white against pink and a burst of blue. Memories aren’t supposed to be like photographs. They’re not supposed to be stark and clear and detached. A summer day is supposed to swim in hazy gold. It’s supposed to feel sticky with heat, and taste like tart lemonade that you think you remember seeing a fly fall into. Skinned knees and tripped over laces that remain untied. A feeling with a few details that stick. That’s what a memory is. </p><p>Bucky doesn’t remember like that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Longing Rusted Daybreak

This is the reason minds are supposed to get mushy as we get older, Bucky thinks. Memories are supposed to fade, go fuzzy around the edges, reshape themselves to a smile, just a flash of white against pink and a burst of blue. Memories aren’t supposed to be like photographs. They’re not supposed to be stark and clear and detached. A summer day is supposed to swim in hazy gold. It’s supposed to feel sticky with heat, and taste like tart lemonade that you think you remember seeing a fly fall into. Skinned knees and tripped over laces that remain untied. A feeling with a few details that stick. That’s what a memory is.

Bucky doesn’t remember like that.

He remembers mechanically, impersonally.

He remembers dates. And if you tell him one he can see that day like a photograph. Crisp, and clear, and a few steps back, to get the full picture.

It’s all too much really, to have rattling around in your skull. He gets older but nothing ever goes fuzzy. Not the things he wants to go fuzzy anyway. He’s too old, with skin too young and a head too full.

Bucky lets one leg dangle off the edge of the painted over billboard he’s perched on, his other leg drawn up towards his chest. He’s stiff, each muscle tensed just enough to be prepared to leap into action at a moment's notice. He’s always tense, but his expression used to be empty, dead eyes and matted hair. Now he can’t seem to keep his eyebrows from furrowing, if only slightly.

He tugs his cap down further, sunlight glinting off the metal surface of his arm, fully exposed in the black t-shirt he’d donned carelessly. No one was out here. It was farmland. A single truck might putter by every three hours, the driver might squint at the glare coming off the person sat up on the billboard, but they wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t think too hard about it, would forget.

He flexes the fingers of his eye-catching arm, watching the metal shift and rotate, almost fluidly. He runs a metal finger over the wood beneath him, he can sense from the prosthetic in vague ways. Like if you took a stick and poked at something, you can gage texture, but not temperature. Size but not sense.

He huffs a short breath and lets his head fall against the wood at his back, eyes becoming unfocused once again.

He’d been trying to remember lately. Remember past the clear images he could flip through in his head like a photo album. He’d been trying to see through the static that’s been before that for so long. Sometimes blue eyes floated through the static, so determined, so determined Bucky immediately felt guilt, he knew he must be disappointing them. He wanted to apologize to the owner of the blue eyes because he couldn’t remember. Sometimes the thing that pushed through the static was a feeling, soft and warm, so much warmth around his heart that it always made Bucky choke. Gamboge blossoms unfurling behind his ribcage, something too delicate to be held within a man like him. Sometimes a taste was what burst through, it was sweet. It had taken him a while to figure out exactly what it was, what that specific taste was.

It was plums.

Nothing whole ever came through the fog. Just snippets. An arm slung over shoulders. A punch thrown to protect those determined blue eyes. A meal with spices that smelled like home, eaten too fast and leaving him with a burnt tongue. Pounding feet down streets, down alleys, always running somewhere, always following those blue eyes, he’d follow them anywhere. He thinks he did.

Buried in that static he keeps hoping to find refuge from the torrent of violence that flickers behind his eyelids in an endless barrage. Blood, red and bright, hot, tacky, dried, rusted and flaking. Screams and shouts that bleed together into wails that make Bucky want to draw his knees up to his chest and cover his ears. Death. Always death. Blank faces, drained of color and expression. Dead eyes. Dead eyes like Bucky’s.

He just wants to see something else.

When he does, it’s like coming up for air. A deep, rattling breath, that fills your lungs so much it _hurts_. Makes your ribs crack, your chest heaving, expanding and contracting too fast. Blue eyes. Warmth. A smile. Blue eyes. Determination. Feet pounding down a dirty street. Blue eyes. Inhale. And then with a few words his head’s shoved back beneath the water. Ready to comply.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I might add on to this. Just needed to type it out.


End file.
